Each day China grows larger and larger. Land is being reclaimed from the sea along the country's coastlines at a frantic pace, pushing its boundaries out farther and farther. How big China will eventually get nobody knows. This is a list of 11 places in China that were built on what was once water.

China and the USA have made a partnership to increase the free flow of people between each other's countries. This is a good move for world travel and global cooperation that more countries will hopefully adopt.

There is more that separates China and Taiwan than a narrow strait. Where ancient buildings and traditional neighborhoods are seen as a barrier to profit on one side they're the other's ticket to develop a budding tourism industry. There is perhaps a reason for the shift in the winds of tourism.

Cross-Straits relations continue improving between the PRC and the ROC as the "One Country, Two Governments" policy is becoming a reality. There is only one major reminder of the days when these two political entities were arch-enemies: the giant signs on Xiamen and Kinmen's Dadan Island.

They came from just about every other corner of China to start new lives in a remote outpost in Inner Mongolia. Ordos Kangbashi was meant to be one of China’s new urban utopias though it hasn’t yet worked out that way.

As China's so-called ghost cities fill up they are forgotten by a mainstream international media that is hungry for sensational stories, not rational takes on what is surely the most expansive urbanization movement in human history. Here are five new cities in China that have filled up with people and commerce since being heralded as ghost towns.

Dancing through Chinese bureaucracy is a Kafka-esque endeavor, a mashing of contradiction and a collision of mutual exclusive parameters. But something can be both black and white here, so you keep dancing.

Nanhui is a full scale, independent new city that is being completely built from scratch 60 km outside of downtown Shanghai. It is being constructed to house 800,000 people, but is currently in the ghost city stage of development: hanging somewhere between being deserted and coming alive. This is the story of what I found there.

Laowai Comics is a comic about all aspects of the China expat experience. This week's installment pokes fun at the ridiculousness of the better-than-thou attitude that English teachers are often affronted by in China.

I was interviewed yesterday by Steve Collins for the Australian based internet radio channel RadioRoaming.com. We talked about Xiamen, China, and about my new book Ghost Cities of China, which is due to come out some time soon. You can listen to the interview below or head over to RadioRoaming.com to listen to it and [...]

China is very rapidly becoming "mall-ified" as large swaths of its urban areas are being redeveloped as self-contained residential/ commercial clusters centered around shopping malls. What effect does this have on the culture?

I looked out my window and said, "Oh no, not again . . . oh wait, maybe . . . . just maybe . . . could this really be fog? It was, and it was beautiful. Check out these photos of the almost mystical fog that covered Xiamen a couple of evenings ago.

The Laoye Temple waters, otherwise known as the Bermuda Triangle of the East, have seen the disappearance of thousands of ships over the centuries, and remains one of the world's remaining big mysteries. This is the story of what I found there.

The Western media called Zhengdong and Ordos Kangbashi desolate ghost towns that exemplified the impending fall of China, I said that they were peopled and showed potential. Now you can look at these two interactive street views and find out for yourself.

Same symbol, different context, different meaning. You can not cherry pick meaning, it's provided for you through the interplay of the culture you're from, the one you're in, and the context of your surroundings.

Today's China is an interplay of contrasting worlds, which is perhaps no better than stepping out of an ultra-opulent shopping mall and into the streets of an old, working class neighborhood in Shanghai.

Ryan Lee played his cards a little differently. Instead of graduating university, getting a job, a wife, and struggling to afford an apartment he took off traveling. Making his money playing music in the streets, he's traveled for more than 15,000 kilometers around China.

In Laowai Comics #117 a joke leads to a exposition of a fundamental culinary difference in East Asia cultures. Laowai comics is a webcomic about all aspects of life in China. A new installment is published each Thursday on The China Chronicle.

When it comes to civics and social studies, there can be a fine line between teaching students about their home country’s history and heritage and indoctrinating them with blind patriotism. Does this handout portraying the Yellow River as “the Mother River of China” cross the line?

What is so important about Hong Kong TV that 80,000 people would demonstrate against the government's decision to deny them a broadcasting license? It's more about what this scenario represents in a rapidly changing Hong Kong.

This Friday's timelapse video comes from 56 photographers who took and assembled over 200,000 photos of 49 different cities across China without ever meeting AFK. It's called China in Motion 2013, and was made by the Union of Timelapse China.

Taiwan's giant yellow duck's rear end blew out, Beijing's was deflated and shipped on to its next destination, and Hong Kong's had an inglorious death before being resuscitated and sent to Pittsburgh. Is this the end of the giant yellow duck era in China?

Each Friday on The China Chronicle we'll bring you a new timelapse video from somewhere in China. This one comes from Joe Nafis, who took the following footage over a two year period from his apartment. This proves that you can watch China changing just by looking out your window.

“Some women drivers lack a sense of direction, and while driving a car, they often hesitate and are indecisive about which road they should take,” stated a post on the Beijing police department's official microblog account on Tuesday. This, and other useful tips like, [women drivers often find that] “when they’re driving by themselves, they’re [...]

"How can you eat this, if you eat this it will kill you," spoke a man in China's gutter oil industry. He is probably correct. Gutter oil is still a problem in China, here are some videos explaining what it is an how it is produced.

Bridges fall down in China way more than they probably should. Perhaps it's partially because the proper authorities say that railway bridges with cracks riddling their foundations are completely safe. Watch this video of a guy ripping pieces off a railway bridge in Shenzhen with his bare hands.

"It was like everyone had gone made for ten years." This is perhaps the most accurate way I've ever heard China's Cultural Revolution ever summed up. The ten years of this movement were surely some of most absolutely insane in recorded history.

The ancient neighborhood of meandering alleyways and centuries-old grey brick homes that occupied this area for hundreds of years had already been demolished, cleared away --effectively erased from the slate of modern China. There was only one reminder that this ancient neighborhood ever existed at all, and that was the house I was standing in.

While it's generally bad form to go into another country and start flinging around the morality of your own culture, there was something at the Nanshun Crocodile Park that tweaked even my worn out sense of cultural relativism.

Maybe you've seen them hanging off the back of Chinese kids like bibs put on backwards and wondered what these strange accessories were. No, they are not yet another way that adults here cute-ify their children, to the contrary they serve a very functional roll: they soak up sweat.

I think of all the things that thousands of dollars could buy, and an auspicious license plate does not come to mind. A license plate with a string of a few 8s in a row does not seem worth 100k to me -- then again, I am not a nouveau riche Chinese.

Buzzing around China in a BMW, a Mercedes, or a Lexus is nothing in this country anymore , they may as well be Volvos. To impress anybody here you need to roll up in a Porsche, a Ferrari, or a Maserati.

Mongolians have simplified the food pyramid down to one lump category: animal food. They consume milk and animals and some noodles and that's about it. They say their diet is what makes them so strong.

Engineers are seriously all over the world, living permanently on the road, going from project to project. This is one of the best ways to travel and work concurrently. Watch an interview about the lifestyle and work of the traveling engineer.

The word got out in China that eating poultry could give you bird flu, whether it's true or not is yet to be discovered, but massive amounts of people throughout the country are not taking any chances.

12 people have been arrested in China for spreading reputedly false bird flu rumors. But in a society that tends to be skeptical about its government and media being transparent, where else can people turn for information?

As Hong Kong's economy rises, many of it's old traditions are fading away. Lunch singing, a type of lounge act that is performed in eateries, is one such tradition that's on the verge of disappearing for good.

I recently reported that Christianity is thriving in China and the government is taking a much more hands-off approach, then a Christian bookstore worker gets thrown in jail in Shanxi. China is a vast menagerie of contradiction, and to report on it properly you need to embrace this reality.

A college student in Chongqing toiled for eight days moving bricks on a construction site to pay back a loan he took out to buy an Iphone and unwittingly became a symbol for China's post-90s generation.

Yujiapu is set to become the world's largest financial district and the world's greatest knock-off. Based on Manhattan's FiDi, It will even have its own Rockefeller Center and a pair of towers that look a lot like those of the original World Trade Center. This is almost too surreal to believe.

The parks of China often start filling at 6AM. By eight, they are a fury of elderly people doing tai-chi, calisthenics, dancing, and walking backwards. I met a group of old men who were whipping spinning tops in the big, spacious, and nearly deserted central park of Xinyang's Shanyang new area. All around us were [...]

A massive exhibition center stood vacant next to an equally desolate museum and theater, forests of high-rises reached up into the sky but sheltered nobody, and a sea of uninhabited buildings stretched out in all directions as far as I could see. I was in Xinyang's new district, in the south of China's Henan province, [...]

3,000km, five locations of interest, 7 provinces, 2 provincial level municipalities, 8 days, sleeping on trains, reporting from a bicycle, investigating China's ghost cities. I'm currently at the halfway point of this tour, and what I've found is perhaps more intriguing than any city without people could be. But I won't offer a spoiler here, [...]

There are two modes of production that exist in China virtually side by side which stand in polar opposition to each other. There is the world of mass-manufactured goods, which consist of synthetic things with switches and buttons and lights that are shot out the end of factory assembly lines, and then there is that [...]

There were people in that city. There were walking on the sidewalks, driving cars, riding electric bicycles, talking on mobile phones, slurping noodles in restaurants, sipping cappuccinos in cafes, playing with children in parks, and doing exercises on the stadium's track. There were people in that city, but there shouldn't have been: I was in Dantu, one of China's [...]

The most insane thing about modern China may be the fact that it's not out of the ordinary, strange, or conspicuous to walk through city streets wearing a mask. The Chinese wear these masks for many reasons, one is to filter out pollution. 2013 has so far been a record year for air pollution in [...]

It is too easy to rag on China. This is a country that has the world's worst air quality, where contaminated food and water scares are common; a country that has an incredible gap between the rich and poor, a totalitarian government, and a heinous human rights record; a country that's ravishing its own environment [...]

I got out of bed this morning after a sleepless night of coughing, wheezing, and going through the rounds of some kind of head cold/ respiratory infection nightmare. China's air pollution is taking another hit at me. This is an ongoing affair for just about anybody who lives in this country. Among other hazardous chemicals [...]

A man with a tri-pronged steel spear attached to a bamboo pole is looking intently down into the murky water of a heavily polluted canal. He is walking down the bank slowly, with absolute focus on something he saw flinch beneath the surface. He slowly raises the spear over his head and lets if fly into [...]

Walk into a bakery in this China and you're bound to see a wall of danishes, muffins, donuts, rolls, and croissants that have hot dogs baked into them. Who would take a perfectly good pastry, stuff a hot dog in it, and wait until it gets cold to eat? The Chinese, of course. Though I believe [...]

An older peasant woman tried to elbow past me and usurp my position in the line leading into the train carriage. I stopped her short with a stiff arm and some sharp words. Around a hundred anxious passengers were in line behind us and I wasn't going to let them trample me. But as soon [...]

We decided to come to China for a variety of reasons. Wade has spent years here before and wanted to return, Mandarin Chinese was one of the languages we wanted our daughter Petra to learn on her travels, and we wanted to make some money. I am a preschool teacher and working at as an [...]

TAIZHOU, China- I bought a drink at a cafe in a mall and moved to take a seat in the single booth that was provided for customers. There were two women already sitting there, but it's OK to crash someone's table here when no others are available. But I stopped short: One of the women was [...]

The international food aisle is something that's becoming more and more popular in supermarkets throughout China. Where they once were obscure outside of the major cities, they have now become a common sight throughout the inner provinces. The expat communities here can pat themselves on the backs and proclaim that their tastes are being catered too, but [...]

Everybody who has ever traveled has been here: You're riding on a bus or in a seat on a train for a long journey. You begin getting a little drowsy, your head starts to teeter, and all of a sudden you feel your face fall upon either the shoulder of the passenger sitting next to [...]

If you're ever wondering what it's like to live in China, cut right to the point and go to Laowai Comics. Twice weekly, this site presents us with the comedic fodder that make us expats and travelers in China exclaim: "It's true! It's really like that!" They are the product of a long term traveler that [...]

I heard the squeaking of a Chinese fiddle and the screeching of a female Chinese voice as I walked through the streets of an old neighborhood in Taizhou. Though people have been living here for millenia, this community just had its hundred year anniversary. The houses were arranged in hutong style and everything was constructed [...]

You can often hear them coming before you see them. Their horns are blaring and their drums are pounding. Then you see the line of people wearing little white hats marching with a two foot high, colorful, paper palanquin. This is a traditional funeral procession, which is now often only seen in the villages of [...]

I was recently asked by a friend how much it costs to live in China. I had to think about this for a moment, and then replied, "China is incredibly cheap to live in, but it's not so cheap to travel in." No matter what country you're in, living there or traveling there puts you [...]

Chūnyùn (春运), China's Spring Festival travel season, where the country sees over 2 billion journeys within a 40 day period, has begun. Starting 15 days before the lunar new year, people all around China rush home to be with their families for the holiday. As the people of this country have now been scattered all [...]

Being told that the would be given updated, biometric passports that would allow them to travel easier, the Chinese government lured Tibetans in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) to give up their old travel documents last year. Not only did they not receive the new passports but their old ones were not returned. Due to [...]

Even as China modernizes at a pedal to the metal pace, certain elements of its old traditions and beliefs remain relevant and important throughout the society. Though formal religion took a major hit during the Mao era which it will probably never recover from, ancestor veneration is still alive and well. It's purpose is to [...]

The sky city is an urban engineering concept that essentially consists of building a single super structure that could literally house an entire city. Homes, workplaces, stores, schools, and recreation areas would all be in the same colossal building. The idea is seen as a way of dealing with population density issues in various places in the [...]

Air pollution in China has gotten so bad that it's become an element of weather. You get up in the morning, sit down with a cup of coffee, check the weather, check the smog. Like weather reports, the air pollution report changes by the day. The strange thing is that the two are not coordinated, [...]

Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau has a cute new mascot on their website to convey to the public the quality of the air they are breathing each day. It's a little cartoon girl with pigtails who lets us know how much PM 2.5 particulate matter is in the air with her emotions and hair color. When the air [...]

I wasn't expecting much to stand in my way as I was riding my bike from Taizhou to Zhenjiang in order to check out the Dantu "ghost city." Least of all was I expecting smog to stop me short. The trip was going fine as I rode down past China Medical City and Gaogang. It [...]

Early tomorrow morning I should be getting on my fold-out bicycle and peddling from Taizhou to Dantu, which is a district of Zhenjiang, on the south side of the Yangtze River. A 70 kilometer trip -- not bad. My estimated time of departure is 5 AM, and I aim to be there around nine, but [...]

Hit a bull's eye? Nope. How about a rooster's body? At the Ice Festival at Jilin live roosters are hung upside down on a big block of ice and used as targets in an archery game. Tourists pay for a chance to skewer the hapless birds with arrows. From QQ, translated by China Smack: 2013 [...]

You can often hear a whirling, buzzing sound while walking through the parks of China. It sounds like a cross between an angry hive of bees, crickets at dusk, and someone tuning in an old radio. It come from people playing with Chinese yo-yos, or Kongzhu, the precursor to the diabolo. Kongzhu are essentially just [...]

We've reported on the behavior of visitors in Chinese zoos on numerous occasions -- from feeding garbage to monkeys in the Nanjing Zoo to giving cigarettes to macaque and baboons in the Taizhou Zoo -- but it is our impression that the photos that surfaced on China's social media networks of a mob of men pelting lions with snowballs in the Hangzhou [...]

A truck carrying 1,000 cats crashed in Hunan province on its way to restaurants in Guangdong. A police officer sent out a call via Weibo and dozens of volunteers showed up to rescue the poor cats and treat the ones that were injured. The group then paid the driver of the truck for the "livestock" [...]

Many years ago I was standing in a long line at the immigration office in Hangzhou. Everybody there was going through the arduous rounds of Chinese bureaucracy -- which leaves nobody in a pleasant mood. All of a sudden, two big Pakistanis tried to walk right up to the front of the line. Everybody tried to pretend [...]

Having a baby in a foreign country can be difficult challenge in most countries, but it’s a extremely difficult challenge in China. I should know, my wife and I had baby #3 here in China a few weeks ago.

The east of China is again engulfed in a blanket of smog so think in places you can hardly see down the street. Children have been ordered to remain indoors, and the people have been ordered to take measures to protect their health.